Untitled

RATP, the Paris transit authority, describes Pensamiento y alma huichol as a composition in three levels: the underworld in the bottom 30 panels, the earth in the middle 20 and the sky in the top 30.

De la Torre has said his murals are read from the bottom up: “Los hombres cuando nacen, crecen de abajo hacia arriba, por eso es que los murales también se leen de esa manera” (people grow from the bottom up once they are born, and that is why the murals are read that way too).

Neurath was told again and again that the west, the sea and the coast of Nayarit lie below, in a dark zone, where many of the dead live, and INPI's Los Wixaritari makes the sky, ruled by Mother Eagle, a sixth region beyond the five places.

In the reading of Misterio y viaje by Juan Manuel López Rodríguez of the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, the three sacred spirits stand along the bottom. At the center of the bottom row is Tatewari, Grandfather Fire, the highest deity. To the left of Tatewari, as he writes (on the viewer's left in his diagram), is Tatutsi Maxacuasi, Grandfather Deer-Tail, the peyote and historical memory, and to the right Tacutsi Nacawé, the Grandmother, the creation of life.

In Johannes Neurath's account of the ancestors' first pilgrimage in search of the Hill of Dawn, they traveled as one family: the great-grandfather Tatutsi Maxakwaxi, the grandfather Tatewari and the grandmother Takutsi, the three López Rodríguez places along the bottom. INPI's book for Wixárika children calls Tatewarí the wisest of the gods and the first mara'akame, Nakawé the most powerful goddess of the wet world and the mother of the gods, and the Great-grandfather Deer Tail a god who is deer and fire at once.

From Tatewari's dwelling, in López Rodríguez's reading, a road of scorpions runs to the left and a road of butterflies to the right.

López Rodríguez makes the two roads opposites. The left one, with the scorpions, belongs with darkness, the moon, death, destruction and evil, and the right one, with the butterflies, with the rising sun, light, resurrection, the food of the spirit, life and rebirth. De la Torre himself, describing Visión de un mundo místico, spoke of “los caminos del infierno y del cielo” (the roads of hell and of the sky) without saying which road is which.

Both roads leave Tatewari's dwelling, and in INPI's Los Wixaritari Tatewarí is the only god with the power to open and close the sacred door that separates the world above from the underworld, the place of the dead; the same book makes the sky, ruled by Mother Eagle, the last place the dead go.

Each road has an eye at its outer end: the road of scorpions starts at one on the left, and the road of butterflies ends at another on the right. No published reading of these murals names them, but De la Torre counted “los ojos del mundo” (the eyes of the world) among the parts of Visión de un mundo místico. The books that first published Wixárika yarn paintings with their makers' keys explain what such an eye is. Juan Negrín wrote in 1975 that the hole at the center of a nierika is an opening into the supernatural world, a channel through which the ancestors may enter human reality and the shaman may look into theirs, and that the ancestors also use nierikate to watch people. Thomas Benno Bollhardt wrote in 1985 that in its narrower sense nearika means the entrance to the other world, where it grows light again after a dark passage, and that a god's eye marks that passage with concentric colors.

Butterflies also carry people along a road. At the festival of the first fruits, Negrín wrote, the singing shaman chants the pilgrimage to Wirikuta, where the small children are taken in spirit, carried by the shaman who becomes a butterfly. In his 1986 key to a painting by José Benítez Sánchez, he describes such a road as the one the children follow, seated on it, as the shaman's song leads them to Wirikuta.

Two lower roads from Tatewari lead, in López Rodríguez's reading, to two equipales, or seats: a dark one facing the night at the left end of the second row from the bottom, and a luminous one facing the sunrise at its right end.

The Wixárika chair is the uweni, a splint armchair with a backrest that shamans sit in to sing, and Olivia Kindl writes that the miniature 'uweni brought down in the temple on nights of singing are where the sun can rest on its night passage from west to east through the underworld. In a myth Stacy Schaefer and Peter Furst retell, Tatewari had a little god chair made for the young Sun so that he would not tire on his way across the sky. Neither source ties these chairs to the two in the mural. The 1979 UNAM catalog Arte y magia de los huicholes says shamans sit on equipales to sing the ritual chants and call the gods of the four directions.

In the second row from the bottom, next to the right end, is a two-headed bird. A Museo Zacatecano photograph of the same panel in Visión de un mundo místico titles it “Huerica Huimari (Espíritu del Cielo y Tierra)” (Spirit of the Sky and Earth).

On the back of one of his yarn paintings, Juan Ríos Martínez wrote of “the two-headed eagle of the skies,” in the translation of Juan Negrín, founding director of the Wixárika Research Center. Negrín writes that in that painting the eagle reaches its place as Our Mother Eagle Girl, Tatéi Werika Wimari, a name close to the label's Huerica Huimari.

Nora Rodríguez Zariñán's UNAM thesis on Our Mother Young Eagle reproduces this bird from Misterio y viaje as a two-headed eagle with a rhombus and a serpent, and cites a manuscript De la Torre wrote about that mural in 2000 that calls her “Espíritu del cielo y de la tierra” (Spirit of the sky and of the earth). Neurath names Tatei Werika Wimari, Our Mother the Young Eagle, as the goddess of the daytime sky.

For López Rodríguez the disc at the center is Tapari Tatewari, which depends on Grandfather Fire and stands for the four elements, air, fire, water and earth: “todo gira alrededor de un elemento central” (everything turns around a central element).

Julieta Medina Briones, who directed the Museo Zacatecano, calls the center of Visión de un mundo místico the “Tepari de Tatehuari”, the “Abuelo Fuego” (Grandfather Fire).

A tepari is a round carved stone. Olivia Kindl writes that in the tuki, the round temple, one engraved with figures marks the place where the fire is lit, which is tied to the center of the universe, and covers a hole for offerings such as gourd bowls and arrows. Hope MacLean adds that god disks often have a hole in the center so that the eye of a god may look through into the world of human beings, and Stacy Schaefer, in San Andrés Cohamiata, De la Torre's home community, saw a perforated tepari called the niérika of the sun.

In López Rodríguez's reading, one road rises from the disc to the moon, Jarianaca Metzeri, the feminine, in the upper left, passing through the fields of evil and punishment and the owl. The other rises to the eye of the sun, Xurawe Temai, the masculine, in the upper right, crossing the elements of the resurrection of Tatewari.

De la Torre himself, at the Museo Zacatecano, said parts of Visión de un mundo místico stand for “los ojos del mundo, y los caminos del infierno y del cielo, de donde sale el sol” (the eyes of the world, and the roads of hell and of the sky, where the sun comes up), without saying which road is which.

The names López Rodríguez gives need a correction. In Johannes Neurath's list of the gods, Xurawe Temai, the Young Star, is the morning star, and the sun is Tayau, Our Father; the Huichol-Spanish dictionary of Joseph Grimes and John McIntosh gives xuráve as star and temaicï as young man. In the key Juan Negrín recorded for Guadalupe González Ríos's yarn painting The Birth of the Moon (1973), the moon is Takutsi Metseri, Our Grandmother Moon, a girl who rose to the sky after five days and became the moon.

Neurath writes that Wixárika time and space join the west with the rains and the east with the dry season, and apply the metaphor of night and day to the seasons, so that the rainy season is called the time when it is midnight. He also warns that it would be wrong to think of the underworld as negative or sinister, since the dark zone of the sea and the coast is the most fertile region of the Wixárika universe.

The top of the mural, in López Rodríguez's reading, is Wiricuta, the final destination and the place of the peyote.

In INPI's Los Wixaritari, Wirikuta lies in the east, near Real de Catorce in San Luis Potosí, and is where all the gods met so that the sun would rise for the first time: in Wirikuta the sun was born. The federal decree of 9 August 2023 that recognizes the Wixárika sacred sites describes Wirikuta as where the sun rises after crossing the underworld by night, and where the first deer hunt took place, from whose tracks the sacred peyote grew. Peter Furst, translating Konrad Preuss, notes that Wirikuta, or the sky above it, is said to be the final destination of the Wixárika dead.